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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

No maps

"... He knew his way was not the reader's way, his ground not the reader's ground. It is the very nature of the mystic's journey that he or she goes alone. Where the landscape is always changing one needs advice and encouragement to fire courage - a map is the most useless of impediments."

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An ethnographic novel

Im/placed

The title is a displacement of the word "emplaced." It seems to me there ought to be something active about our placement as human beings. We are not (or should not be) emplaced as an urn is placed in a niche. We are in place as agents. In some sense we place ourselves. In another we create the places we inhabit. In yet another the places we inhabit create us. Our relationship with place and space is complex and contradictory: hence, "Im/placed."

My writing - as all writing - plays the edge of fiction and nonfiction, truth and invention. Some postings are excerpts fromThe Names of Things, a novel, and are labeled as such.Postings under "The Folklorist" heading are snippets from a novel in process. Otherwise, the words here reflect day-to-day experience and reflection. In all cases it aims to get things right.